#SL Blender Clothes Retopology

In my reading I came across an excellent video on how to simplify models. Masami Kuramoto posted the information in the SL Forum. Video Tutorial on Retopology in Blender. 14 minutes of excellent information.

[youtube icqPZnD_3lA]

If you are making Second Life clothes, you need to see this tutorial.

The first tip ralusek provides stumped me. He is not using a key/click display and he went fast enough I missed it even after rewinding three times. I couldn’t get it to work. It is just too handy not to figure out.

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PathFinding Update Week 14

There is stuff happening in Pathfinding. This past week has seen several changes roll out. A new Project Viewer and another version of the Pathfinding server code made it to the Pathfinding regions in ADITI, the preview grid.

New Pathfinding Stuff

In the PATHTEST1,2,3, and 4 sandboxes in ADITI one can see how Pathfinding works without having to program and build their own characters. You can visit and click the big box shown in the image above. You can get all characters for the different Pathfinding behaviors; Evade, Pursue, Patrol, Wander, etc.

Region owners can sign up to be a beta tester in AGNI. Contact Lorca Linden to volunteer.

Map Bug

You may notice that the Pathfinding regions’ World Map tiles are messed up. It’s only a cosmetic problem. The Lindens already have a fix in QA.

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#Second Life News Update II Week 14

There is some meaty news out.

The blog post and charts on grid stability are still in progress. Oskar Linden seems excited that the grid did as well as it did for the past four weeks. May be we will see the post and charts next week. I was expecting them this week.

Beta Server Meeting

Maestro Linden gave us a bit more on the Network Stability fixes that rolled out Tuesday. Some of the throttles and fixes were to prevent some griefer DoS type attacks. That’s about all we are going to get on that.

Hemiptera Cleansing

Next week this server maintenance package should make it to a release channel. The package is currently running in Sandbox Island, ADITI.

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Second Life Pathfinding Week 14

Pathfinding is advancing. More testing is needed. As we play with it we are finding problems. Those are being fixed. Since we are easily finding problems we need more testers to extend the context and hardware variety.

llGetClosestNavPoint()

This call will fail and drag the region’s Time Dilation down if there is no Navmesh within 20m. That isn’t intentional. Expect it to be fixed.

Neat Avatars

Navmesh

The 3.3.1 (251341) Project Viewer does not have working Navmesh tools. Some of them work. The Show Navmesh part doesn’t work for me. The download link for 3.3.2 (252475) fails. So, I am stalled playing with the ‘Tools’ feature of Pathfinding.

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#SL News Update Week 14

There are some interesting news making it out. Server updates are flowing again. That logjam seems to have broken up. Development Viewer updates are flowing. I think the later is more a matter of the download ‘latest’ link being fixed.

Viewers

I’ve gotten hooked on using the Dev Viewer releases. The current stable viewer is 3.3.0 (251182). The current Beta version is 3.3.1 (252229). The current Dev version is 3.3.2 (252822).

Strange Avatars

The last 2 or 3 releases of the Dev Viewer have been crashing on exit. That seems to be less of a problem with this version.

SH-2908 Fix for incompatibility issue with GLSL 1.30 – I think this fix is in the latest Dev Viewer.

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Avastar Rigging and Animation

You may notice some of the newer animations in Second Life are getting better. There is motion capture to thank for some measure of improvement. Another contributor to the improvement is Avastar, a for purchase add-on to Blender.

One of the other handy features of Avastar is the ability to handle rigging a mesh. So, clothes makers and those making other objects rigged to the avatar will find Avastar a handy tool. I think this video gives one a good example of what it can do.

[youtube P81l1NP3yck]

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